The new My Cloud Home drive connects to your router via Wi-Fi and backs up files on all of your family's devices, including PCs, smartphones and tablets.

With its new My Cloud Home external hard drive, Western Digital is once again on the path toward the holy grail of data backup: a single receptacle that will automatically collect every precious file from any smartphone, tablet, or PC in your home.

The My Cloud Home, available in several different storage capacities from 2TB to 8TB, includes software designed to help it on its data collection quest. The primary interface is the My Cloud mobile app, which can automatically upload photos you snap on your smartphone using the Camera Backup feature, either via Wi-Fi or a cellular connection.

The app lets you search for, view, and delete any files you've saved on your drive, as well as access settings like updating firmware and restarting the drive. Many of these functions can also be performed by logging in to your device via Mycloud.com or using the dedicated Windows and macOS apps. The desktop apps also let you configure the My Cloud Home as a destination for macOS Time Machine and Windows backups, as well as drag and drop individual files.

My Cloud Home also syncs with the files you're already storing online, including content from Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. There's Plex support, too, which means you can stream video files to your home theater. You'll also find a USB Type A port for uploading content from flash drives, although you can't connect the My Cloud directly to a PC via USB—it's only intended to be connected via Ethernet to your internet router.

Finally, you can share any file on your My Cloud Home by creating a dedicated link from the web, desktop, or mobile apps. And don't worry about texting your friends a weird URL: My Cloud sharing URLs will automatically be expanded to show their content in apps like Apple iMessage.

Pricing starts at $159 for the 2TB version, and tops out at $319 for 8TB. For extra peace of mind, Western Digital is also offering a My Cloud Home Duo model, which includes two drives in a mirrored (RAID 1) array so that a single file is duplicated on both drives. The My Cloud Home Duo starts at $309.99 for 4TB, and maxes out at $699 for 16TB.

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Tom is PCMag's San Francisco-based news reporter. He got his start in technology journalism by reviewing the latest hard drives, keyboards, and much more for PCMag's sister site, Computer Shopper. As a freelancer, he's written on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and big data's role in presidential elections. A graduate of Middlebury College, Tom also has a master's journalism degree from New York University. Follow him on Twitter @branttom. See Full Bio